A Decade of Archives 2: 2011

This is the second in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

Looking back through the posts for 2011, I felt great fondness for the year, if not for my blogging (I think overall it was one of the weaker years for The Mumpsimus. That tends to happen when life itself is busy and fulfilling, so I'm not complaining!) It was a year when I taught two of my favorite classes, Gender & Science Fiction and Global Literature; when we started blogging the Caine Prize; when Eric Schaller and I launched The Revelator, our very occasional online magazine; when I wrote, directed, and co-edited a short film without knowing much of anything about what I was doing; when I started making video essays; when I got to see one of my favorite Fassbinder movies, World on a Wire; and when I had a whole class pose for a picture whilst reading G.I. Joe comics. And much more!

When looking through the past posts, the one I ended up stopping on and wanting to think about more fully was one that grew out of my teaching of the Global Literature class: "Canonical Nationalism" from December, because though the post doesn't offer anything remotely original, I think it hits on important ideas about how we think about reading and writing, and how the categories we impose affect that thinking.

Formalist?

David Smith, untitled

I have to admit that while plenty of Damien Walter's "Weird Things" columns at The Guardian are interesting, and it's really wonderful to see a major newspaper paying regular attention such stuff, and Walter seems like a passionate and thoughtful person ... the latest one, titled, "Should science fiction and fantasy do more than entertain?" pretty much made me gag. Mostly it was that headline that caused the coughing and sputtering; the piece itself isn't terrible, is well intentioned, and seems primarily aimed at a general audience. I'm not a general audience for the topic, so in my ways, I'm a terrible reader for what Walter wrote. Thus, I'll refrain from comment on the main text.

But there's a statement he made in response to a commenter that didn't make me cough and sputter, it just made me question something I hadn't really questioned before: the term "formalist" and its relationship to criticism within the field of fantasy and science fiction.

In his comment, Walter stated, "The Rhetorics of Fantasy is a formalist approach."

I wonder, though. I haven't read The Rhetorics of Fantasy, so I don't really want to comment on it too much, since my perception is based on reading a few reviews, what some folks have told me, and glancing at the Google Books preview. So it's entirely possible that my question here has nothing to do with that book. I mention it only because it's the book Walter calls "a formalist approach".

What I wonder is how it's possible to have a formalist approach to fantasy or science fiction that is not also perfectly applicable to other sorts of writing. Is there a specifically formalist approach to SF?

To write criticism about SF is almost always to be stuck in content, not form. (We could, and perhaps should, argue about the soft borders between the two terms, the limits of the terms, the fact that content and form don't really exist outside of the words of the text, what that binary hides, etc. — but at the risk of inaccuracy, let's save such an argument for another time.)

There is nothing I can think of at this moment that formally differentiates SF from not-SF.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (3rd edition) is now in beta-text mode online for free, and even in this obviously incomplete form it's remarkable and fascinating. At Readercon this summer, in answer to the question of what works of SF criticism have been as influential as some of the seminal works of the 1970s and early '80s, I proposed the second edition of The Encyclopedia, a book that was not merely a collection of facts, but an argument about how to categorize the world and our imaginings of it. As such, it reduced even someone as taxonomy-averse as I to awe, and the influence of a lot of its idiosyncratic terms and templates on how people write about SF is undeniable.

I haven't had a chance to read a lot of the new material in the online 3rd edition, and have really only spent time with the Delany entry and the entry on Feminism. The Delany entry is basically the old entry plus some apparently quick updating -- its coverage of material by and about Delany after the early 1990s is vastly incomplete, but there's no reason to assume it will remain so. And it's nice to encounter again my favorite phrase from the older version of the entry: "frank and priapic to the verge of the scabrous" (I think "To the Verge of the Scabrous" would be a marvelous title for something...).

The Feminism entry, originally written by Lisa Tuttle, has been updated by Helen Merrick, a great choice for that task. (The entry on "Women in SF" does not seem to have been updated yet.)

(Tangentially, it seems to me it would be helpful to have the contributors page more prominently available. All the abbreviated names of contributors are annoying enough without hiding the page that tells us what the abbreviations mean. It would be nice in the future if the contributors' initials could provide the full name when hovered over. The people who've done all this work deserve credit.)

Just moving the original encyclopedia, with all its references and cross references, onto the internet is a gigantic task. That the team has worked and continues to work on updating it is even more impressive, since it's not like history and the publishing world are going to stop and wait for them to catch up. Even in its current state, it is easily among the most useful reference sites available anyone with an interest in science fiction. I'm very excited to see where it will go from here...

"Mimetic Fiction"

While reading (and enjoying) a recent review at Strange Horizons, I became obsessed with a single word: mimetic. Writing about Vandana Singh's story "Thirst", Dan Hartland says, "Indeed, 'Thirst' is a largely mimetic piece, which opens itself to the fantastic only towards its close..." and then at the end of the paragraph finishes by saying, "two planes often opposed to each other in fiction co-exist and co-mingle, rendering metaphor, allegory and mimesis one". He calls another of Singh's stories "essentially a mimetic story about the search for truth".

There's a minor tradition within the science fiction community of using mimetic and mimesis to mean the opposite of the fantastic. The oldest such uses that I could find (with a quick and profoundly less than exhaustive search) date to the early 1970s, and the casual employment of the term in those contexts makes me suspect that it has a longer history within the SF world as a way to point toward what more generally gets called within that community "mainstream" or (less frequently) "mundane" fiction.

All of these terms are problematic for various reasons, but what struck me this time about the words mimetic and mimesis was how their meaning in this context relates to and in some ways contradicts a few others I can think of -- the classical idea of mimesis as "imitation", particularly "imitation of nature"; Erich Auerbach's influential mid-twentieth century study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature; and, particularly, Ronald Sukenick's use of "mimetic fiction" in various essays collected in one of the many books I currently have out from the library, In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction.

Despite its history within the SF world, I'm not convinced that "mimetic fiction" is the best term for that thing for which there is, admittedly, no perfect term. Using mimesis to describe this thing, though, seems even less perfect to me than most of the other terms, because I'm more persuaded by Sukenick's use of it to mean fiction that tries to hide its illusions. In an essay on Gerald Graff, Sukenick makes this wonderfully efficient statement: "Mimetic fiction depends on the suspension of disbelief; nonmimetic fiction does not."

Almost all genre fiction, of course, depends on the suspension of disbelief, so if we accept Sukenick's definition, then the vast majority of SF is, in fact, mimetic.

This use of the term makes sense to me because it does two things. First, it does not deviate significantly from how the term has traditionally been used -- mimetic fiction in this sense seeks to give the reader a feeling, at least while reading the text, that there is a fundamental reality to the world conjured by the words. Sukenick writes:

The key idea is verisimilitude: one can make an image of the real thing which, though not real, is such a persuasive likeness that it can represent our control over reality. This is the voodoo at the heart of mimetic theory that helps account for its tenacity. Though such schizoid illusions are fostered by concepts of imitation, one cannot have control "over" that of which one is a part, or even formulate it completely -- one can only participate more deeply in it.

It doesn't seem to me that we have to accept Sukenick's preference for fiction that shuns verisimilitude in order to see that his distinction between mimetic and non-mimetic fiction is a useful one, which is the second reason I find it persuasive -- it describes in a more coherent and less problematic way than other terms I can think of what feels to me like a fundamental difference between types of writing. It illuminates some of what is different between, for instance, Tender Buttons and Dubliners -- but also some of what is similar between Dubliners and Tarzan of the Apes.

There is a good argument, too, that using mimesis as a way to distinguish SF from non-SF hides (or at least obscures) some of what SF seeks to do -- we're back at the suspension of disbelief. The creation of believable worlds from at least ostensibly unbelievable material. Such fiction relies upon verisimilitude, which is a point made by writers and critics for decades: that SF is realism on steroids. It seeks to create in the reader's mind what John Gardner called a "vivid, continuous dream". It may not be the representation of what we believe to be "reality", but it is an attempt to represent an imagined reality in a way that the reader does not reject as preposterous. This is worldbuilding. Philip K. Dick once offered advice on "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" -- a nonmimetic writer might offer exactly the opposite advice.

Even the classical notion of mimesis as "imitation of nature" can apply to SF -- particularly to core science fiction, which deliberately tries to extrapolate from known science, and is often based on ideas of nature as we currently understand it. But even in something like Judith Berman's "Rather Cranky Post on Verisimilitude in Fantasy", we're still talking about the imitation of nature.

There is a need for a value-neutral term for non-SF. I'm just not convinced that "mimetic fiction" is what it should be.

Update (7/7/09): Hal Duncan has posted a thoughtful extension of some of these ideas in connection with some other discussions that have been going on around the intertubes.

This is Not a Poem

I'm glad to see that the desire to come up with stable definitions and labels for difficult-to-define-and-label things exists not only within the science fiction community, where the desire for taxonomy seems sometimes pathologic, but also within the world at large. Exhibit A: The Queen's English Society is demanding that poems be defined as things with rhyme and meter (or, rather, metre).

Those of us who have survived interminable discussions of what, exactly, makes something science fiction or fantasy can probably help our friends at the Queen's English Society. In fact, we can let them know that the desire for definition does not end with one term. Oh no. One of the great laws of the universe is: Taxonomy breeds taxonomy. Once we have one label or category, we need many. And then the many need many of their own.

For instance, the Queen's English Society will need to determine whether everything defined as "poetry" is (for instance) immersive poetry or submersive poetry, and then they will need to define whether immersive poetry can be subversive when it is not submersive, and if submersive poetry is inherently subversive or if its subversivity is flexible. Then, of course, they will have to figure out if it is hard immersive poetry or soft immersive poetry, and how such a hard/soft binary interacts with the hard/soft binary of submersive poetry, which is a different sort of hard/soft binary because if it's hard/soft and immersive then it tends to sink in polders, while if it is hard/soft and submersive, it can float in polders. That then opens up the new category of Things That Float in Polders, but we're going to have to wait for a panel discussion at whatever convention is happening next weekend to know if poems that are submersive truly belong in the secondary (or is it primary?) category of Things That Float in Polders, or if the submersive subversive poems actually stand at the edge of the polder and interrogate it. Which makes them into submersive subversive interrogators (SSIs), and some people claim that SSIs are actually mystery stories, not poems. Even if they rhyme. But have no fear -- I'm sure the upcoming anthology of The New Submersive Poetry will clear everything up... (Alas, having been down this route before, I know some reviewers will claim that the book only includes a few truly submersive poems, and those few are not subversively submersive, which makes their submersivity merely an artifact of nostalgia rather than a storm against a barricade, but this is okay because it leaves room for the next anthology: The New Storming & Subversive Submersive Poetry, which will be a really cool book, I'm sure, because it will have a blog. Actually, strike that -- it won't even have a book, just a blog.)

If our friends at the Queen's English Society get tired of defining and subdefining poetry (perish the thought!), they can always argue about the origins of poetry and the first poem. In fact, they should claim one poem to be The First Poem -- perhaps Percy Shelley's "Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem" will do. It's even got the word "poem" in the title, so it must be the first one. Once they have identified a First Poem, the real fun will begin, because it will allow all poem-like objects before it to be categorized as proto-poems, and the possibilities for what can (and can't!) be defined as proto-poems are practically endless. This will allow at least a century of argument, and between this and the argument about defining poetry much fun can be had by many generations of ... people who like to argue about such things! Wheeee!

The real question, though, is what is a pipe?